


Unconditional Love is Just Another Form of Self Harm

by orphan_account



Category: Bandom, Fall Out Boy
Genre: Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-24
Updated: 2013-10-24
Packaged: 2017-12-30 07:42:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1015953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's perfect summer love, the sort that tastes like sunscreen and cotton candy, until it's not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unconditional Love is Just Another Form of Self Harm

The first time they meet, Pete knows he’s going to fall in love with Patrick.

It feels like destiny but less crack-of-thunder-crescendo-of-the-timpani-Aphrodite-burst-from-the-sea and more like hearing a song he didn’t remember hearing before, but knows all the words to. Patrick has lips like rosewater and a voice like burnt brown sugar and Pete wants to steal the taste of promises from them. 

He does.

That’s where it starts.  
\---  
Spring had always been Pete’s favorite season just as fall was Patrick’s and they stare each other down across the expanse of summer’s starlit nights and the glare of carnival lights. The fading harvest moon catches them meeting in the web between the seasons, paints light over red-pink epaulettes of sunburnt skin, licks sweetly down their backs. They gather like stray cats in the no man’s land of the IHop parking lot.

Pete gives him the ring (cheap but pretty, retrieved from a little store in France on a trip he had barely had the money for) at midnight. Summer bites down into their collarbones; they laugh together, humid and too loud and too much, firecracker voices splattering against chipping yellow paint. They lean against their sun-hot van—it creaks on its axles like a shipwrecked ironclad, their warship and fort sticking with sweat to drenched t-shirts—and Pete sinks to one knee with a broad, horse-toothed smile and asks Patrick to marry him. He takes the ring from Pete’s shaking hands and kisses his smile from his lips and he says _yes_ and both of them are joking and neither of them are. Pete blows him right there against the van and god, he smells like hot asphalt and fresh mulberries and stale sprinkler water and peaches, real, ripe peaches and _Patrick_. Patrick throws back his head and shouts Pete’s name like a vow, like _hallelujah_. His throat is laid pale and taut, a line of sweat-clotted cocaine, and Pete is an addict. He threads his hands into Pete’s hair and his ring shines stark and brilliant against sweat-dampened darkness. It looks like it belongs.

They go home together and sing to each other of the way July tastes from chapped lips and it is perfect.  
\---  
Pete and Patrick sing counterpart melodies on rare hotel nights and in the back of the van, pressed tight and desperate between an amp and a guitar case when Joe’s driving and Andy’s asleep. Pete bites lyrics into Patrick’s clavicle and Patrick pays him back in kind, chords delineated in bruises and scratches down Pete’s back. Pete laughs around the words “we’re married” in interviews and Patrick tips out his agreement like $5-a-bottle champagne and they’re both joking but not really, no, they never really have. They date other people and fight and reunite and always come back to one another, to a French ring pressed into Pete’s hips and the taste of July under their tongues.

Every song Pete writes is for Patrick and every time Patrick’s voice hitches on a lyric, it’s for Pete.  
\---  
It’s slow but certain and the worst part is that Pete sees it coming. He doesn’t know what changed or when he stopped being good enough or when it got so hard but it hurts, it hurts, it _hurts_ and the only person he wants to talk about it with is the only one he can’t.  
Patrick meets a girl and Pete helps him buy the engagement ring, swallows down bile and jealousy and wishes him luck. When she says yes, Pete drives to Patrick’s house and claps him on the back (too hard, he knows, but he can’t help himself). His eyes are bright and he’s radiant and that is the moment Pete realizes how much he had faded. They toast with expensive champagne and Pete gargles with overcooked gas station coffee on the drive home. He spits his pain, short and sharp, out the window.

They pack away memories with fair-won stuffed animals run ragged and matted, worn-away t-shirts streaked with oily fingerprints, hoodies shared for so long neither of them can remember whose it was. They replace pizzas shared with the taste of flavored condoms (and Pete can’t remember when Patrick’s taste became too bitter for him; perhaps it was in between the strangled words "I'm married" and the time he moaned his wife's name in bed with him). Their kisses are numb and meaningless for the first time, Novacaine and Vicodin, painkillers that are Pete’s prescription but not Patrick’s, not anymore. Pete splinters and every song he writes is still for Patrick but they are more about cherry pits and cyanide than summer-pregnant air and sweetness. Patrick doesn’t sing for him and Pete doesn’t ask him to. He chips his teeth trying to chew his love to pearl dust.

Patrick asks for some time. Alone.

They do not part along fault lines drawn in shouting matches and blood-stained knuckles. It is simpler and easier and worse. Patrick leaves with the clatter of a French ring in the bottom of a shallow hotel trash can and the firm, final click of the door. 

He doesn’t say goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> I do not own Fall Out Boy and I am not making any money from this work of fiction.


End file.
